Electrical and optical interconnections are critical to essentially all electronic devices, machines, and telecommunications. Interconnections relate to a variety of different interface connections, including, for example, circuit board to circuit board connections, component to circuit board connections, cable connections between circuit boards, and sub-assemblies to sub-assemblies, just to name a few. Indeed, in essentially every electrical or optical system, there are many different levels of interconnect that have to be selected to optimize the performance of the system.
Selecting the right interconnect is becoming more and more challenging. First, the number of applications requiring such interconnects have exponentially increased in recent years. And the number of available interconnects have likewise increased. Thus, at this time, it is essentially impossible for anyone to know the all of the available interconnect options to easily determine the optimum interconnect for a given application. Rather, salespeople and users typically rely on past experience and their own knowledge of available interconnect to select the most appropriate interconnect for a particular application. Obviously, given that no one person can recall all of the available interconnect options, such an approach is unlikely to optimize the interconnect selection. Complicating matters, in a typical sales situation, an interconnect selection needs to be made quickly, so often there is insufficient time to flip through pages of catalogs to determine the right interconnect. The current approach, is to use an e-catalog where products are presented in an electronic format on the user's computer. Such an e-catalog is beneficial in that it allows users to browse interconnect solutions critically and facilitates the electronic capture of desired interconnects, it still lacks the ability to guide the user to the optimal solution.
Failing to optimize interconnect selection not only undermines the credibility of the salesperson or user, but also reflects poorly on the particular interconnect used in less than optimum conditions.
Therefore, there is a need for an interconnect selection approach that is intuitive and leads to a determination of the optimum interconnect for a given application. The present invention fulfills this need among others.